Metier: "The type of work that you have a natural ability to do well"...

1.
Ramen Shop (Ramen Teh)
2018, Eric Khoo (whose 12 Storeys we saw back in 2016)

The metier in question: Cooking.

The plot: Masato (Takumi Saito) works at the family ramen shop in a quiet Japanese city. His father, Kazuo, who lost his Singaporean wife, Mei Lian (Jeanette Aw) many years ago, is a very withdrawn man, and his son struggles to connect with him. When Kazuo suddenly dies, Masato thinks that the time is right to rediscover his Singaporean heritage. He reconnects instantly with the food (appropriately, as his parents met at a bak kut teh restaurant), and meets several welcoming relatives, notably Uncle Ah Wee (Mark Lee). But grandma (Beatrice Chien) -- whose bad war-time experiences left her implacably opposed to her daughter's union with a Japanese man -- remains obdurately unforgiving towards Masato too. Ultimately food wins out, and Masato touches her heart. And a ramen/bak kut teh fusion does sound like an interesting idea (which is also why Ramen Teh is a much, much better title -- but genuinely difficult to render into English).


In the movie, Masato visits this museum, which houses a permanent exhibition on World War II and its legacies (the rest of the photos in this post come from various trips to Singapore)

Pluses: Food, food, food... Beautiful shots of ramen, and of all the stars in the Singaporean food firmament (we won't get into how many of them are also claimed by Malaysia...). For us, it was a really nostalgic movie, bringing another of our former homes vividly to life. Khoo launched this project when a producer friend asked him to work on something to celebrate 50 years of diplomatic relations between Japan and Singapore. That's the sort of commission that could have made for a really dull product. But Khoo managed to produce something moving and appealing, while not glossing over the problems of history. He says it's his favourite film.

Minuses: Unabashedly heartstring-tugging. But what's wrong with that?



2.
One Last Deal
2018, Klaus Haro

The metier in question: The art business.

The plot: This is another story about families coming together. An aging Helsinki art-dealer, Olavi Launio (Heikki Nousiainen), is finding life a little tough. His customers are growing fewer, money is tight, and he's starting to feel like a fossil. Now a widower, he has cut himself off from his family over the years, barely talking to his divorced daughter, Lea (Pirjo Lonkrta), or his only grandson, Otto (Amos Brotherus). Then he comes across a painting that he KNOWS is special. Determined to end his career on a high note, he schemes to buy it, and -- aided by the grandson, who needs to tick some boxes on his work-experience sheet -- sets out to confirm its provenance (and its great worth). As they work together, the two start to appreciate each other, and when poor old Olavi quietly dies, we find he has bequeathed the painting, now known to be very valuable, to Otto, to make sure Lea doesn't inadvertently sell it for less than it is worth.



Pluses: It's low-key, but it really works. There's a little bit of a mystery to solve (what is this painting exactly, and why did the auctioneer not know its value, and will said auctioneer succeed in his plans to thwart first Olavi and now Lea?) There's the family rift to heal (not a straightforward process, as relationships are really not Olavi's strong point, and he can be a bit unscrupulous when he has his heart set on something). And there's a lot of humour in watching grandfather and grandson begin to appreciate each other's methods (one is an electronic ignoramus, while the other struggles to get his head around even the concept of actual rather than virtual sources).

Minuses: I guess this is familiar territory... There's nothing to chew on for days as you worry away at the significance of something. Then again, sometimes that's exactly what you need: Something that's easy to watch at the end of the day with a glass of wine.



3.
Elementary (Primaire)
2017, Helene Angel

The metier in question: Primary school-teaching.

The plot: Florence (Sara Forestier) is a really dedicated teacher, leading rowdy but productive class discussions, and offering extra help and support to the strugglers. It's not an easy environment. Separated from her husband, parenting a child, Denis (Albert Cousi), who's also in her class, and living in a flat on the school premises, she exists in a kind of pressure cooker. And teaching is anything but a piece of cake. There's all that youthful energy to channel; there are teaching auxiliaries and trainees to supervise, and school inspectors to accommodate; and hovering over everything are the unseen education policy-makers whose speciality seems to be to lay even heavier weights on people who are already about to collapse under the strain. Into this fraught situation steps young Sacha (Ghillas Bendjoudi), who has apparently been left home alone (again) by his mother, and whose grubby exterior and aggressive attitude create chaos wherever he goes. The only person the school can round up to take charge of the kid is Mathieu (Vincent Elbaz), one of Sacha's mother's ex-boyfriends. It's not really his responsibility, and he's a bit flaky himself, so Florence ends up stepping into the breach (keeping Mathieu on side, dealing with Sacha, confronting his mother...), apparently unaware that all the while she's further alienating Denis, who wants to go and live with his father in Indonesia... By the end of the movie, Florence has begun to learn that she can only give so much. She assents to Denis going off with his dad; Sacha goes into a home; and she's got something going with Mathieu.



Pluses: The classroom scenes are great (the film-maker's two-year observation of classes clearly paid off). You marvel at all that buzzy energy, constantly on the cusp of tipping over into chaos... You marvel at the sheer patience of the primary-school teacher. And the kids' rendition of the Greek myths -- there's so much courage required to be a human -- is really moving.

Minuses: The romantic relationship that develops between Florence and Mathieu felt like a huge plotting mistake... And there's not quite as much of a spectrum visible among the teaching staff as we witness in The Teacher, for example, giving the film a bit less of a critical edge.



4.
The King of Comedy
1983, Martin Scorsese

The metier in question: The stand-up comedy business.

The plot: In the case of Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), the metier is not so much something he CAN do well as something that he desperately -- desperately -- WANTS to do well. With no actual experience before an audience, he practises his routines at home (with mum interrupting from somewhere offstage). Undeterred, though, he pesters famous talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) to give him a slot on his show. When his increasingly intrusive eruptions into Langford's life don't succeed, he decides, aided by another unstable fan, Masha (Sandra Bernhard), to kidnap the TV guy, and demand airtime as a ransom. The network powers-that-be agree, and Rupert gets his dream spot. Jerry, meanwhile, escapes from confinement, and arrives downtown just in time to watch Rupert do his stuff. Winding up, Rupert tells everyone about the kidnapping: "Tomorrow, you'll know I wasn't kidding and you'll all think I'm crazy. But I figure it this way: better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime." When the FBI arrive, he doesn't resist arrest. And despite his prison sentence, Rupert actually achieves celebrity. He writes an autobiography, which is to be made into a film, and in the culminating scene, takes the stage for a live TV special, where he is introduced as The King of Comedy. Or does he...? Some commentators suggest this last section is all in Pupkin's mind (as some previous snippets have obviously been). Scorsese himself, though, implies the ending is real: "[Pupkin] becomes successful without being good. He’s good enough. That’s the most unsettling part, that he’s good enough." And he is, actually. I don't generally like stand-up comedy, and I cringe at the masochistic inclination of Pupkin's script, but I've heard worse...



Pluses: It's undoubtedly a window onto celebrity culture and the insane world of the media, and the facets it highlights have surely only got worse since it was made... Simon Abrams, in 2016, writes: "Pupkin is a uniquely media-obsessed megalomaniac. His lack of talent is irrelevant: he succeeds because he cannot process rejection, and he is successful at pushing buttons. Sound familiar?" And here's Matthew Jackson in 2019: "The King of Comedy ... remains one of the most eerily prescient films of the 1980s."

Minuses: It left us looking at each other, asking: "What was that, actually?" And it has divided critics probably more than any movie I've come across. For Roger Ebert, it is "one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies" he has ever seen, and although he appreciated it better on his second viewing, he still found it "frustrating to watch, unpleasant to remember, and, in its own way, quite effective..., the kind of film that makes you want to go and see a Scorsese movie." For Mark Kermode, meanwhile, it's Scorsese's "finest -- and most often overlooked -- work", "perfectly pitched between satire and horror", and "quite breathtakingly brilliant". It didn't succeed at the box office, and Scorsese apparently hated making it: "The deliberately cringe-worthy material was unpleasant even from behind the camera. 'By the time I got to shoot it, I found that I didn’t like dealing with the story; it was so unpleasant and disturbing, it crossed so many lines that normally divide private and public lives,' Scorsese later told film critic Richard Schickel... Scorsese also later admitted that he found the film so 'unsettling' that he avoided seeing it after it was finished..." All of which I suppose you could regard as a plus...